The Seedy Legacy of Rock Music II

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“ROCK ‘N’ ROLL” is a word from the depths. As a word, there is no modern word that can compare to it. It’s as resonant as a Chaucer word. First, each of its parts is both a verb and a noun. “Rock,” the noun (Rock the noun!), is a most basic object. Hard. “Upon this rock I will build my church,” said Jesus. An object-word that defies scale -- it can fit into your hand, a rock, or it could be the whole planet. While as a verb, it leaps from the sturdiness of its noun-definition into movement, back and forth, oscillating, going from yin to yang and back again, rocking.

“Roll” is sweet, as a noun. Lush. Soft. Eschewing every traditional Anglo-Saxon word for the female organ, recently freed New Orleans slaves were calling it a “jelly roll” over 100 years ago. So juicy did they find the expression that it came to mean [the male reproductive organ] as well as [the female], both genders singing about “my jelly roll.” The first great jazz composer called himself Jelly Roll Morton. Then there’s “roll of fat,” “roll of bills” -- that kind of roll. And as a verb (Roll the verb!), it can move and it can move and it might never stop, end over end over infinity. Oceans roll.

Putting the two together, “rock’n’roll” was a term from the juke joints of the South, long in use by the forties, when a music started being heard that had no name, wasn’t jazz and wasn’t simply blues and wasn’t Cajun, but had all those elements and could not be ignored. In those juke joints “rock’n’roll” hadn’t meant the name of a music, it meant “to [have sex].” “Rock,” by itself, had pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least. “Rock’n’roll” was a juicy elaboration on the old usage. When, finally, in the mid-fifties, the songs started being played by white people and aired on the radio -- “Rock Around the Clock,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “Reelin’ And A-Rockin”’ -- the meaning hadn’t changed. The word was so prevalent that the music began to be called “rock’n’roll” by disc jockeys who either didn’t know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew. The term stuck.

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That American music is rooted in Africa is a cliche, and cliches are useless. But to trace that root is a revelation. It’s a root that goes so deep that some of our most common terms -- terms often associated with the music -- are from African languages that haven’t been spoken on this continent conversationally in close to two centuries. Robert Farris Thompson, the art and music historian, has found that “funky” is from the Ki-Kongo lu-fuki, meaning “positive sweat.” Which is virtually what it means, in a metaphoric sense, in American language today. He notes that now the Bakongo people use the American “funky” and their own lu-fuki interchangeably “to praise persons for the integrity of their art.” It’s a word that’s been around America for a long time. Song titles place it in New Orleans circa 1900, and it was apparently well established by then. Which means this is not slang. This is a word in the American language Its roots and its longevity prove that, whether or not the word has found its way into our dictionaries and our middle-class usage.

Mojo, a word found in many a rock and blues tune, is Ki-Kongo for “soul.” In North America for at least a century it has meant an object that’s been invested with spirit power, soul power, and has the capacity to cure or heal or influence. “I got my mojo workin’,” one song says. When my family moved not long ago, one of the movers, a black carrying a packing box of mine labeled “Voodoo,” looked at me humorously and took his “mojo stone” out of his pocket to show me. When I asked to hold it, he wouldn’t let me.

Again, this isn’t jive-talk or a fad of speech. Its usage is too firmly rooted and too constant. This is our language.

Our “boogie” comes from the Ki-Kongon mbugi, meaning, according to Thompson, “devilishly good.” Juke, as in our jukebox and juke joint (which often did not have juke-boxes) is the Mande-kan word for “bad,” for among righteous blacks as well as righteous whites, this was bad music played by bad people in bad places.

Robert Farris Thompson thinks that “jazz” and “jism” likely derive from the Ki-Kongo dinza, which means “to ejaculate.” And the use of the concept “cool” among the Yoruba people of Africa is precisely the same as its use as popularized by jazz musicians in New’ York forty years ago -- another usage that’s remained constant with us. Said one Yoruba informant to Thompson, “Coolness is the correct way you represent yourself to be a human being.”

Hear That Long Snake Moan. Michael Ventura. Shadow Dancing in the USA. St. Martin's Press. 1985.

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So you had an uptight "Christian' civilization that thought that sex was evil, and produced cold, stiff marching rhythms, often used for ungodly armies plundering and pillaging. (this is why people like Ventura think there should be such an 'antidote' for Christianity). So instead of spreading the true Gospel to the world, they just went around "conquering and to conquer" (Rev.6:2), exalting themselves and enslaving people, and to the African slaves, as most unevangelized people from warmer climates, sex was itself like a religion, so this was mixed into the music. The "Christians" were no less sexually perverse; only they covered it up more.
Now who should have known better? The slavemasters may have banned the rhythms and taught them good ol' traditional style melodies, but this did not erase sin; only further disguised it. And that is what this obsession with traditional Western culture is all about. Disguising sin, like a whited sepulchre; just like Israel of NT times. We just don't learn!

This is no substitute for the proof demanded of your arguments. In the other threads, you keep talking about a "line" being drawn, and you won't prove the line over there, but if this is supposed to be the proof, you are failing miserably. It is still the same old broken cycle of "associations", which then jumps to "natural effects", and then finally to "God just doesn't like it". None of this is any proof; just conjecture.

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You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon (Lenny Kaye, 2004) describes the manners and techniques of legendary crooners centering on the life and career of Russ Columbo. The crooner needed the microphone...

...because it allowed him to sing softly. To mouth each word as it came out of his mouth, to send it just toward you, you, just the way you always wanted to hear it, and experience it, how you always wished it would be, head back, eyes lidded, hand pressed inside your thigh, to reach that one moment of total real-time bliss in which something meaningful passes back and forth between your heart's flutter, to know how deep love can stick its tongue in your ear.

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Rudy Vallee was The Man with the Megaphone....

Well, it certainly got his voice out there, up close, closer, able to focus in on that one face, upturned, caught in the spotlight. He loved seeing just the right girl, the eyes in the crowd that suddenly dilate until you're playing just to them, she to you. Performance was taking that trick, and having every girl in the audience think it was she you were staring at. And you were.

Really, it was for the girls. The guys came, grumbling and full of p*** and vinegar, but that was because the girls were there. He sang to the feminine, and they understood he knew their secret fancies, and fancied secrets, enhanced by the romance rags and the scandal sheets and the on- and off-screen romances that told them how it was supposed to be.

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The shadow play. A popular thirties photo trick. There’s one of Russ holding a pipe, his silhouette in sharp outline, his own 2-D cartoon character following him in duet. Here’s one of Rudy holding his saxophone as he would a lover, right hand around her bare back, fingering the high keys, left hand on her swivel hip, low-keyed, head bending down, as if in prayer. As if.

"I sing with [censor allusion to sodomy] mouth," Rudy took delight in saying. ... His reference was to the sensuality of his delivery; but it also further recognized the blurring borders between masculine and feminine, the mingled genders of the croon.

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Texas barrelhouse piano player Robert Shaw put it this way much later: "When you listen to what I’m playing, you got to see in your mind all them gals out there swinging their butts and getting the mens excited. Otherwise you ain’t got this music rightly understood. I could sit there and throw my hands down and make them gals do anything. I told them when to shake it and when to hold it back. That’s what this music is for." (Hear That Long Snake Moan, Michael Ventura)

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Russ--like Bing [Crosby]--had spent years watching people swirl in front of him, letting him serenade their parading, their pressing and preening. Pairing. He liked keeping his eye on a couple shimmying near the bandstand, eyes intent on each other, and he, with a shimmer of his violin, could transport himself into their next move. On a slow song, in tune, he could whirl them up into making an overture--an accord, a chord--that might otherwise be shocking, a kiss reaching for a high note, three touching tongues as if they were all in embrace. (Kaye).

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Sorry, but piling more on still does nothing to prove your point. Yes, people are sinners, and some find music techniques that they can tweak up to use for their sin. This was especially easy coming out of a culture that, once again, was overly uptight and thought physical "flesh" was evil; this pushed people to burst out in liberation. Read what Paul says in Rom.7 about simply trying to control the flesh with laws without the Spirit. Most of us today can listen to the same stuff and not be so influenced by it. So others go the opposite direction and try to be stiff and rigid, but end up as no less sinful. Actually, the "loose" people always wind up being more likely to see their sin and come to repentance, as we see right in the Bible.
So the solution is not to go back to the previous culture, upholding it as the standard. Thus, you have come none closer to proving your "line".

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Originally posted by tinytim: I know alot of banjo pickin drunks, maybe that is why I hate to hear banjo's in my gospel music.

If we are basing our theology on opinions instead of God's Word then ...
Banjos are from Satan!!
(Please note the "If" in the previous sentence)

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Let's not forget fiddles and violins.

In the excellent documentary, "High Lonesome", we're told that the fiddle was once called the "Devil's Box" because it was believed to drive women into a sexual frenzy and encouraged men to lay about and drink.

In that film, Bill Monroe tells how he and his two brothers were thrown out of their church for playing the fiddle.

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Originally posted by tinytim:I read the OP, the term began in Cleveland.

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Actually, as Ventura stated, the term was long in use before Alan Freed used it to describe the "rock" of early fifties.

Ventura's essay is required reading in many university music history courses. It's an authoritative source.

But it had a meaning with yet another root. For since roughly the turn of the century, and possibly much longer, in the singing churches of the blacks, when the songs were yelled and sung and the hands were clapped and the sweat was pouring and people were testifying, fainting, speaking in tongues, being at least transported and often saved, which meant to be overwhelmed by the Holy Ghost--that was called “rockin’ the church.” “They made the church rock.” Upon that rock their church was built, more than on the stone of Peter. And the screams of rock that go right through you high pitched screams that aren’t joy and aren’t agony but sound like both together, and sometimes like the human equivalent of microphone feedback, screams that yet are beautiful in their raw and naked and utterly committed flight out of the throat the screams of Little Richard and Janis Joplin and Aretha Franklin and James Brown and Bruce Springsteen -- those screams came straight out of those churches. You can hear them on virtually any recording of black church music -- either field recordings from the little shacklike rural churches, or more sophisticated gospel recordings by people who sing the music as professionals. Such a scream. What can we call it but a holy scream? Unlike anything in Western music before it.

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I'm not attempting to answer anything in my posts thus far. My second is simply a continuation, not a rebuttal.

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I didn;t really think it was, but still, none of that stuff is proving anything.

Speaking of the "fiddle", the violin was once called "the devil's fiddle" as well. (and the organ "the devil's bagpipe". Perhaps I should have responded by pointing these things out-- as if they haven't been pointed out repeatedly before).

Which universities?

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Probably BJU and the KJVO's. Perhaps some radical right wing secular universities as well.

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Originally posted by Eric B:Probably BJU and the KJVO's. Perhaps some radical right wing secular universities as well.

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I guess we'll never know. Usually, when someone makes such a grand claim and then asks if you "know how to use Google", it means that he's just throwing anything available against the wall in a desperate hope that something, no matter how trivial, will stick.

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The Webmaster says, "I've noticed the growing habit of posting whole articles on various forums.

Please do not post copyrighted or trademarked material without first obtaining the express permission to do so by the copyright or trademark holder.

Post only a summary (or key paragraph) and a link to the article instead. It is acceptable to quote other people's work so long as you credit them by name, include the title of the work, and do not repost the entire article.

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If you think the blurbs I've cut and pasted are anything close to the "whole article" (Kaye's quotes are from a book actually) then you're welcome to report the posts. But you'd look like illiterate knucklehead in front of all the moderators.

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Music is music. Classical music can be, and has been, used for evil purposes,[See: Hitler, Wagner, "Playing for Time."] as has jazz, rock, Country, Blugrass, and Japanese music. The tune to "The Star Spangled Banner" was originally a bawdy drinking ballad. Most Hymns were written in the popular music parlance of their day. The cut-time 2/2 of celtic music is just as pagan in origin as African rhythms or South American salsa. As for Hebrew music forms, what do you think they were playing and singing in "the groves" of the Kingdom period? I don't think they had access to "In da Hood," or albums by "Queen!"

If you are seeking to tell us that different forms of music had a pagan origin or use, and that people have used them for nefarious purposes, my answer is, "well, DUH!" Proving that music has been used for evil purposes is like proving there is air.

The question is: "So what?" Should we limit church music to chanting the psalms--oops, can't do that, monkish monkery and popish popery is in that! Should we use baroque instrumentation and structure? Do you seriously think there is no possible evil intent in any standard musical form?

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